09/04/2008

biden really does palin comparison

Focusing on the outcry over the media coverage Sarah Palin
has been receiving since the announcement about her taking the Republican VP
slot last week, Simon perfectly enunciates what I never could in my severely
limited attempts at voicing my opinions:

…On
behalf of the elite media, I would like to say we are very sorry. We
have asked questions this week that we should never have asked. We have
asked pathetic questions like: Who is Sarah Palin? What is her record? Where
does she stand on the issues? And is she qualified to be a heartbeat away from
the presidency?

…We
should stop making with all the questions already. She gave a really good speech.
And why go beyond that? As we all know, speeches cannot be written by others
and rehearsed for days. They are true windows to the soul. Unless they
are delivered by Barack Obama, that is. In which case, as Palin said Wednesday,
speeches are just a “cloud of rhetoric.”

…Sarah
Palin wanted the media to report on her teenage son, Track, who enlisted in the
Army on Sept. 11, 2007, and soon will deploy to Iraq. Sarah Palin did not
want the media to report on her teenage daughter, Bristol, who is pregnant and unmarried.
Sarah Palin thinks that one is good for her campaign and one is not, and that
the media should report only on what is good for her campaign. That is our job,
and that is our duty. If that is not actually in the Constitution, it should
be. (And someday may be.)

Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen, who has written
best-selling books on gender differences, said she agrees with complaints that
Palin skeptics — including prominent voices in the news media —
have crossed a line by speculating about whether the Alaska governor is neglecting her family in
pursuit of national office.

“What
we’re dealing with now, there’s nothing subtle about it,”
said Tannen. “We’re dealing with the assumption that child-rearing
is the job of women and not men. Is it sexist? Yes.”

“There’s no way those questions would be asked of a male
candidate,” said Howard Wolfson a former top strategist for Clinton’s
presidential campaign.

Ultimately, I like Palin. A lot.

But there’s still no way in hell
that I’d ever attached my vote to a McCain campaign. The fact that they
managed to find someone to run in the VP position who would do much better headlining
the ticket doesn’t change the fact that McCain is a slimeball with
nothing better to do than sell Americans out at the domestic level while
playing up his foreign policy credentials. If we’re going to have
four more years of mismanaged policy at home, why not put it all in the lap of
someone as easy to write-off as Barack Obama?

Barring the possibility of McCain dropping
out of the race in the next two months for age-related reasons, I will continue
to throw my vote in for a post-Obamalyptic dystopian future where Americans are
finally shaken back to reality.

Yeah, it sounds bad, but we have a nasty
tendency of finding order only after chaos. Just look at Carter and his inspiration
for Reagan.